


messing with the danger zone

by orphan_account



Category: Political RPF, Political RPF - US 21st c.
Genre: Attempted Murder, Gen, Gore, Masturbation, Non-Consensual Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 04:41:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6551458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How is Craig Mazin, with his insubordination and gossip, still alive?</p>
            </blockquote>





	messing with the danger zone

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
>  
> 
> let's go

The first time Ted came back damp, Craig thought he was drunk.

Which. You know. That was fine. That was actually kind of a relief. Craig had suffered through three weeks of this bizarre robot-lizard thing in his personal space. Ted breathed funny, like he had to think about it. Ted stood silently at his shoulder and watched him type up his Intro to Psych papers. Ted took his ink ribbons at the same time that Ted taped a boundary down the center of the room. Ted hit snooze seven times though he did not seem to sleep. Ted appearing drunk at least proved to Craig that he had some flicker of humanity in him, buried under the dough face and the beetle eyes. Craig watched him come in, watched him unzip his dripping jacket. What little light that came from his desk lamp turned the drops black on the floor. Ted moved, too, in a way dissimilar to his usual herking-jerking. Smooth, rolling. Alive. He was smiling. The smiling wasn't particularly an improvement over the blank and cypherous but hey, at least it showed that the guy felt emotions besides...was neutral an emotion? Probably not. Craig sat up in bed and attempted a jovial, friendly tone. "Big night, buddy?"

Ted's hand paused on his zipper. The smile retreated into the usual careful neutrality, but there was something else there. Craig couldn't quite tell what, not at this distance.

"You're still awake," Ted said, and he said that in his usual odd, clipped way.

"I had a paper to finish. I was too lazy to hit the light. Hey. You have a good night?"

Ted kept his eyes on him. Craig blinked a few times, hoping to encourage Ted to do the same, but after a bit he guessed that not even a whole fifth of vodka could fix all of a lizard.

"You could definitely say that," Ted said, at last.

"Get a girl?"

The smile came back and, yep, all things considered Craig preferred the neutral look. Ted hit the light, the fluorescent overhead one, and Craig's spit froze in his mouth. When last he'd seen that Members Only jacket it was beige. It had, in the interim between four PM and now, gone dark red at the front. Great gouts at the neck, at the epaulets. Dripping. The droplets on the floor turned from black to deep red and Ted took a step closer and Craig smelled him, not vodka or even weed but raw and rot and red. His gorge rose.

"Yes," Ted said, and his smile could kill angels, "yes, Craig. A very, very beautiful one."

Craig could not think of what to say, or what to do. He drew up the covers, as if that might protect him. Ted withdrew a knife from his pocket and tossed it just so it rested on the tape cutting up the room. The blade glinted, wet.

Ted, in what he probably thought was a genial tone: "I do not think I have to warn you of what will happen if you tell. Do you understand?"

They had a phone in the room. Craig could - he couldn't lean over because Ted had seen him glancing at it and had come up to him flash-quick. He did not grab Craig round the neck, or produce another knife; he just came up, and his pupils were dilated even in the light, and he stank, oh Christ, he stank of death.

"Do you understand, Craig," Ted said.

Craig whimpered, but he managed a nod. Ted patted him with a reddened hand, stepped back.

"Good night, Craig," Ted said, in his usual lizardbot voice, and he turned off the light on Craig's desk, and he turned off the fluorescent overhead, and Craig heard springs creak.

And. Nothing. Not even, he thought, the sound of breathing.

Looking back, Craig would not believe he fell asleep so quickly, but he'd been tired from that stupid paper and the brief burst of adrenaline faded into dull and exhausted terror within minutes. He dropped off. He had awful dreams.

In the morning Ted was gone, and the knife was gone, and Ted's bed was as well-made as if it had been carved of stone, and there wasn't any death-stench. Craig let himself joy in those facts and think about things like Ivy stress. You got weird nightmares from that, right? He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood and something sticky gave beneath his bare left foot. He stood on his right to clean it off and found that he had stepped on a crushed but still recognizable human eyeball. The sclera slightly yellow where it was not pink from broken blood vessels. The iris recognizably blue.

Craig heaved, but he hadn't eaten in twelve hours and the blessed cessation of nausea that vomiting would bring did not appear. He could collapse, though, to his knees, and he could sob.

He missed his first class.

 

  
*

 

Craig prayed.

Ted came back wet.

Craig prayed.

Ted came back not just wet but hot, the steam rising from him in gouts like the scent, absently licking his wrist, absently rubbing at the scratch running down his neck.

Craig prayed.

Ted dropped hair. Eyeballs didn't bounce when they hit uncarpeted linoleum. Teeth did.

Craig prayed.

Ted stripped. His khakis. His shirt, his tie. His tight white underwear. His jacket - how he managed to clean it impeccably every night, Craig did not know - he took off, but instead of hanging it up, he folded it under his arm. He did not turn off the light before he got into bed.

Craig prayed.

The mattress creaked as he clambered on. Ted had not gone under the covers. Ted held the jacket up to his mouth, to his nose. He licked it. It was drying fast so the blood from it that he wiped down his body was mucilaginous and dark. The hand free from the jacket settled at his groin. The mattress creaking took up a steady rhythm.

Craig stopped praying. A loving God, or even a vengeful one, would have answered by now.

 

*

 

Ted hit snooze on his alarm seven times, though he was surely awake, though Craig had had almost an all-nighter and no class till eleven-fifteen. Craig slept in the library afterwards.

Ted walked off with two blank notebooks he'd bought just that weekend at the campus bookstore. Craig did some quick budgeting in his head. He didn't have to eat lunch tomorrow, did he? He could replace them. Ted took the replacements, too.

Ted's bed creaked. Creaked and creaked, every night. Semen mingling with the gore. Stank. The bed did not seem to stop creaking when the semen scent came up. Craig had lost a great deal of weight in the last three weeks. He lay cocooned, his covers tucked under his head, and silently counted his ribs. His Walkman worked but Ted had taken his headphones a month before and he did not have money for more of them. He had to stay up and listen.

But he was tired, so tired, and he had a test in his math class tomorrow, and he could not bear it anymore. He sat up. "Ted?"

Ted went stone-still under the cover of his bloody beige.

"Please," Craig said, and he hated himself, how tired he sounded, how defeated, "please don't jerk off when I'm trying to sleep, dude. All I ask."

Ted sat up. Ted looked at him. Craig had just enough time to see the knife glint in his hand, had just enough time to jerk back, before it was buried up to the hilt in his shoulder. Ted had excellent aim.

But that was it. It was in him, and he looked down at it, and it didn't hurt. He supposed that was what dying felt like, maybe, or shock, this dull itch.

Ted's lips parted.

Craig wrapped his hand around the handle. He could at least go out quick, unstop whatever artery the knife had split and then sealed back up. He'd heard that bleeding out was almost comfortable. You had a taste of euphoria before you went all the way into the dark. He pulled, and the knife went out like from butter.

He didn't bleed.

Ted's lips trembling.

Craig shouldn't press his luck given his terrible run of it of late, but he pulled up his shirt to make sure. The wound closing up before his eyes. A fibre from his T-shirt caught up in it but not a drop of blood.

Ted full-body trembling.

Craig got up on unsteady legs. He retrieved his notebooks from Ted's desk. He was trembling too. Relief. Craig picked up his ink ribbons on their spools, his headphones, and carried them back to his desk, hugging them like a child would hug a kitten. He turned, and he held out the knife, and his shoulders shook. Not laughing, but not crying exactly either.

"Stop fucking touching yourself," he said, clear and loud. "I'm trying to fucking _sleep._ "

Ted could kill angels with his glare. Ted got up, and he got the cleaner for his jacket. The ammoniac scent overpowering. Craig didn't care. Craig got back into bed, and it was a blessed, blessed sleep.

 

  
*

 

DMs. He had DMs all the time, mostly from HuffPo and Gawker, asking for interviews. What was the point of interviews, really? They had his Twitter. Just look at that, they'd get the gist.

 _You will stop._ A blue Verified check next to the name.

_Or what. Or WHAT, you freak. You can't do anything to me._

_You have a family._

Craig swallowed, but he pressed on. _I have the notebooks. Remember? MY notebooks. That you stole. You wrote your code in them. I kept them. They have your fingerprints._

_I've had twenty-eight years to crack it and I know where you put the bodies._

_Try it, Teddy. TRY it with my family._

He could see the snarl inexpertly hidden by the careful neutrality even from a thousand miles and twenty-eight years away. He could feel it. Hear the creak. Smell the semen.

Ted didn't respond. Craig ferreted the packet of needles from his pocket, took one out. He shoved it hard as he could against the skin of his finger. The needle broke. He took in a deep breath through his nose. You're safe. You're safe, Mazin. Chillax.

He didn't sleep that night, even so.


End file.
